The Qwerty Effect

The Qwerty Effect

Article excerpt

What makes you like one word more than another? Meaning is part
of it: Most of us prefer words like bunny to words like ringworm.
Age and poetic associations play a role, so that forthwith garners
more warm fuzzies than monetize, and ineffable feels nicer than
agreeance. Relative rarity probably makes a difference, too, with
words like estivate ("to spend the summer, especially to spend the
summer in a special place or manner, especially dormant") having an
edge over prosaic everyday words such as faucet or return.

But a recent study by researchers at University College London,
published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, has turned up
another, unexpected influence: the "QWERTY effect." Named after the
characters of the traditional keyboard layout, the QWERTY effect
boosts the positive associations of words that include more letters
typed with the right hand on a QWERTY keyboard. The effect extended
even to made-up words, and it was found even in left-handed typists.

What's so great about words with letters from Y, H and N on over?
The researchers believe they benefit from a psychological effect
known as "fluency," according to which people view easy-to-use
things more positively than hard-to-use things. Because most people
type faster and more comfortably with their right hands, there's a
slight increase in positive associations for right-hand-heavy words.

We tend to think that our connotative associations with words --
those not purely meaning-driven -- are still related to wordlike
properties: etymologies, literary associations and so forth. But a
growing body of research suggests that other factors play measurable
roles in how we react to words.

A German study found a similar phenomenon to the QWERTY effect
with numbers, as a result of association by predictive texting:
People preferred the number 373863 (which spells friend in German)
to the number 7245346 (which spells the German word for slime). The
same researcher, Sascha Topolinski of the University of Wurzburg,
found that people liked companies better when their phone numbers
spelled out related words, like flower for a florist. …